Using an Educational IoT Lab Kit and Gamification for Energy Awareness in European Schools
This work addresses energy sustainability education for European schools, but it is incremental as it applies existing IoT and gamification methods to a specific educational context.
The paper tackled the problem of promoting energy awareness in schools by deploying IoT infrastructure and using a maker lab kit with a serious game, resulting in strong acceptance by the school community.
The use of maker community tools and IoT technologies inside classrooms is spreading in an increasing number of education and science fields. GAIA is a European research project focused on achieving behavior change for sustainability and energy awareness in schools. In this work, we report on how a large IoT deployment in a number of educational buildings and real-world data from this infrastructure, are utilized to support a "maker" lab kit activity inside the classroom, together with a serious game. We also provide some insights to the integration of these activities in the school curriculum, along with a discussion on our feedback so far from a series of workshop activities in a number of schools. Our initial results show strong acceptance by the school community.